


all men are monsters / craving the oblivion of blood

by verushka70



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-17
Updated: 2011-11-17
Packaged: 2018-02-23 08:14:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2540714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verushka70/pseuds/verushka70
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Damon is not without self-reflection. He just finds brooding pointless.<br/>Stefan supposed if you gave up trying to please someone who could never be pleased – Father – why bother trying to please anyone again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all men are monsters / craving the oblivion of blood

**Author's Note:**

> Some time between 3x07 Ghost World and 3x08 Ordinary People.

_Damon_

 

Elena told him something once. That after her parents died and the initial numbness wore off and the great hole of loss set in, she and Jeremy talked about them sometimes – but when they talked, she realized with a shock that Jeremy remembered their parents very differently than she did.

The grief counselor had an explanation. “Every child in the same family has a different mother and father.”

She might be young and human, but Elena – or the grief counselor – had a point.

Damon had had a completely different father than Stefan.

He’d always imagined that being the apple of their father’s eye made everything so easy for Stefan. Only now did Damon realize it meant Stefan was taught only how to be indecisive and ineffectual. What decisions could you make – how could you even practice making decisions – when they were all made for you?

After so much time, it was a bitter yet strangely satisfying realization: struggling against his father’s disdain and disappointment forced Damon to grow up, to break free. He had to learn to live with himself and live on his own, without Father’s approval – in ways Stefan never did. Never had to.

Never had the opportunity to.

No wonder Stefan couldn’t handle anything.

Their mother, though – Damon thinks maybe they saw their mother similarly; hard to say for sure. They don’t talk about her anymore, haven’t for decades. Damon keeps closely guarded the secret that he frets that his memories of their mother are nebulous, mourns that his memories of her warm, gentle, understanding presence are more vague feelings than images. He can’t even quite picture her face anymore. He suspects that the image of her in his memory is based more on her daguerreotype than it is on his own experiences of her. He hates that that could be possible or even likely.

Giuseppe made her stop “coddling” Damon quite young; demanded the boy Damon was act like the man he wasn’t, yet. Her warmth was always there, but Damon could only seek it out at risk of his father’s derision. He remembered her warm hand lingering on his shoulder, behind his back, or, rarely, on his cheek – hurriedly pulled back if his father entered the room. But he can’t quite remember her face, sees only the image of her from the tintype.

By the time he realized he no longer cared what Father thought, Mother had passed away. He could never go back for more warm, quiet moments where he was loved and cherished for who he was, rather than for what he did or how he behaved. The only person who freely gave that to him was taken forever when she died.

Memories of Father are sharp and clear – the memories Damon least wants to recall. He expected (hoped) they would fade with time. They haven’t. He pretends they don’t still affect him more than a century after the end of his human life.

How could one person, so long ago, have such power over who he is today?

But then, look at Klaus and Rebekah. A thousand years later, as terrified of their father as the children they were a millennium before.

Damon is not without self-reflection. He just finds brooding pointless. One thing he has reflected on, though: it’s probably good he can’t father children now, and never did (that he knows of).

Somehow he knows – no matter how much he might want to be different to the children he might have had, than his father was to him – he would inevitably become the monster father they feared.

Because unless they are weak and useless – qualities ill-suited to being a provider, to being a father – all men are monsters eventually. They have to be.

The world makes them. Nothing in it is fair. 

 

_Stefan_

He hates that he can not do anything on his own. Co-dependent, they called it in the 80s. When he is on his own, he goes too easily off the rails. What he should do for himself, he can only do for others (drink bunnies, stay off the human blood, don’t kill). When that person is not there – when he has no one – he can do nothing for himself, or everything he does is for himself, with no care for anyone else.

Never a happy medium.

Of course, with the wrong person – Katherine, Klaus – he goes easily off the rails too; they just have to get him away from people who keep him sane. Lexi. Elena. And – perhaps surprisingly, after all these years – Damon.

That Damon was the one who went off to war, Stefan found ironic. If either of them were well suited to mindless obedience, Stefan thinks it was himself. Damon was always too rebellious – how could he follow orders?

When not at loggerheads with each other, Damon’s and Giuseppe’s mutual disdain simmered under the surface, making the air in the house thick and heavy. Unwanted dinner guests diluted the atmosphere to a point where Stefan disliked dinner parties less than he hated being home alone with Damon and his father.

Damon hadn’t wanted to approach their father about Katherine. He knew better than to trust Giuseppe. Stefan, of course, had thought he could reason with him about Katherine. He was wrong, of course. Not the first time Damon’s distrust proved to be the right move.

But it was easy for Damon. He was his own man. He was the proverbial island that no man is supposed to be. He did what he liked; he didn’t much care what people thought. Stefan supposed that once you gave up trying to please someone who could never be pleased – Father – you wouldn’t bother trying to please anyone else again.

Stefan’s problem, of course, was that he tried at all. What had he been? A good boy, his father and mother told him, because he listened and obeyed, did what he was told. Disappointing his father was crushing – he couldn’t take feeling he had let Giuseppe down when he should be grateful for all that he had. All Giuseppe wanted for him was a better life than his own; Stefan felt horribly guilty when Father was disappointed in him. Father’s love and pride was a lot to lose, and Stefan felt so chastened the few times Father has thundered over him at some thing he’d done, that he did whatever was necessary to keep it.

And so he made sure Father was never disappointed in him. Had Katherine not have come into their lives, Stefan would have led his life exactly as Giuseppe wanted him to. He would have gone to school, married a Founding Family’s girl, stayed in Mystic Falls, kept the homestead and plantation – no matter how much he secretly enjoyed stories about the Wild West and the likes of Jesse James, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok. 

But then Father had always been more affectionate with him than with Damon. Stefan remembers bouncing on Father’s knee many times, warm in the circle of his arms. He can not recall a single time Father did that with Damon.

So Stefan did what Father wanted him to do; was what Father wanted him to be. What everyone wanted him to be. Until Katherine and after, when he went off the rails the first time, starting with his own father – not the first of the many deaths he would cause, but maybe the most abjectly mortifying, the most ruinous, of all of the deaths he’d dealt.

He couldn’t even blame Katherine for that. She was already dead. Or so they’d thought.

It keeps him awake, never lets him get a moment of peace while he craves and dries out and his veins scratch together like sandpaper (Katherine whispers) and he despairs of everything, locked in the chair in the basement of the jail. He can’t admit (aloud, anyway) that the reason why nothing will ever be the same with Elena is because she knows.

She knows everything he’s done, now – what he’s like when he’s out of control and has no one like her or Lexi to pull him back, to temper his worst desires. She knows what he’s like when someone like Klaus eggs him on – or worse, when no one at all but his own appetite and emptiness enslave him, craving the oblivion of blood.

Elena knows. That shame burns worse than vervain, the sun, worse than fire. Knowing that she knows what he’s done, how he drowned himself in blood, exulted in it, ripped them apart and put them back together, and sort of liked Klaus (even as he hated him) for making him do what he secretly yearned to do anyway.

Elena knows. It’s like being caught masturbating. It’s worse: Elena now knows he is totally incapable of curbing his most bestial desires. It is crushingly humiliating. In Klaus’ company Stefan has been, for all intents and purposes, a corrupt libertine of blood, a perverse connoisseur of torture and killing.

It will never be the same. He can never regain the person he was in her eyes before; it’s too late. Even if she forgave him, there will always be a fearful glint in her eye, no matter how trusting the rest of her face is.

With that waiting for him, why not give up? There is nothing left for him but blood. Damnation and blood and death after death of others at his hands, if not his own.

It’s ironic that Damon is trying to help. Damon is the last person who should want Stefan to recover. He loves Elena, Stefan knows. He should want Stefan to be incapacitated or off the rails and evil forever, the better to pursue Elena. And, at this point, Stefan is no longer sure who deserves her less – Damon or himself.

But Damon can be surprisingly principled and chivalrous. He always could, even back in the day (such as the argument between Father and Damon about deserting, both dug in and refusing to budge). So Damon seems to want to help Elena get Stefan back to the way he was.

Damon is also ruthless enough to keep Elena safe. Stefan doesn’t know if Damon got that from his time as a soldier, or when they were apart after they transitioned to vampires. He just knows that Damon will always do what must be done to keep her safe – even if Elena hates him for it later.

Stefan is not that strong. He could not stand the idea of her hating him. Before, anyway. That's why he’d rather die than try to repair the irreparable. That’s why, whenever they had to deal with someone, Damon was always the bad cop.

How could Damon be a better soldier, be better suited to it, than Stefan would have been? Damon never listened. He was always headstrong.

Damon explained it to him once.

“They aren’t counting on you to obey orders. They’re counting on you fighting for your brothers when the other side is trying to kill them. Even the guy who cheated you at poker last night – they don’t get to hurt him; only you do.”

Stefan supposes that’s why, despite their differences, despite Father, Katherine, Elena, Klaus – despite everything, Damon and he will always be bonded.

Only he and Damon get to hurt each other. Not the rest of the world.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted for the Porn Battle November 17, 2011. Prompt was _Stefan, Damon - "And those scars last; they become holes in people’s souls they work their whole life to fill.”_ from [ovariesofsteel](http://ovariesofsteel.livejournal.com/).


End file.
